Tag: postaday

A cake with cherry on top is delicious, but for a chocoholic like me, m&m’s serve the same purpose.

I like to bake for my loved one’s and this cake was baked on demand for my nephew on his birthday. A vanilla Cake with Chocolate Ganache: Good, m&m’s on top : better, but the Cherry On Top moment for me was the delighted smile on my nephew’s face and how quickly he devoured it 🙂 That’s the best part of making food, isn’t it?

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Happiness is the most sought after, hyped, overrated and overused concept in our society. It is sometimes confused with some other overrated concepts like Success, Victory, Achievement, etc. But is it really about that?

I think happiness is the state of being happy. It’s not related to how much you can have, and how much more you can try to possess. It is not how many people like you, or follows your path. It’s not about how many trophies you have, or how much world you have seen. You can have all the things in the world and still you’ll never be happy if you are not content. And if I tell you I’m a genie and can grant you 3 wishes, you’ll immediately think of asking 3 more wishes as your last wish.

So if all this madness that is possessing, acquiring, and conquering is not happiness, then what it is?

I guess it’s the little moments of joy, which makes our life better. Happiness is like the sand on the beach. You stand on it, feeling it with the soles of your feet, wiggling your toes in it to take as much pleasure from its softness as you can. Occasionally a strong wave of crisis comes your way, and you may feel the sand slipping away from under you. But when you regain your composure, it’s still there. You pick up the dry sand and it slips through your fingers and you’d think it’s gone. But really it’s not! Even if it’s not handful, there are some grains that stick to your palm. Aren’t happy memories like that? Even if the moments pass by, the memories remain. And they too, like the moments themselves, have the capacity to make us happy.

Even on your bad hair days, there must be some good things that are happening to you. You just need to retrospect. And you’ll surely find some memories that made you smile that day. When you think your job is a joke, think about hundreds of jobless youth who turn towards crime to earn their bread and butter. If you think your lunch was bad, think about those who survive on leftovers dumped in the bins. If you think your house is small, think about those who lost theirs due to drought/earthquakes. We find ourselves thinking about our misfortunes more often, instead, we should thank god for all the good times he has shown us. Instead of asking god, ‘Why me?” we should be thankful to god for both good and bad times. Because the happy times get you by in bad times, and bad times teaches you to appreciate happy times fully.

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As a baby everything around is new to them. They slowly learn things by keenly observing how each and everything is done. It’s a pleasure to watch a baby learn new things. They learn that they need to cry to get something. They learn that they need to put forward their hands to reach out for something. Many such slow incremental things accumulate in order.

Now the task is if you were to see something with a fresh new perspective, what would be it? Give a baby step to something and explore this new perception and dimension with your engaging thoughts. You can give a fresh meaning to a new word, sentence, concept or anything weird or meaningful.

Some time back, my nephew took a really innovative aptitude test. One of the section had an exercise, you were given one word, and you had to draw the first thing that came in your mind after reading the word. He was given the word : Tension. I would have drawn a haggard face, rubbing his forehead with his thumb and index fingers, depicting the ‘feeling’. Surely, I later found out that google image search agrees with me. Just look at the below picture:

And here’s what my nephew drew (Well not the same, but, pretty much the same):

Which one is correct, do you say? Obviously both! But I wouldn’t have thought the second solution in a million years, at least not as my first thought! and I started wondering, why would I think about a negative feeling rather than a really simple and common concept in physics. Am I a negative person? No! Am I stressed out? Probably, but I know how to de-stress myself. I remember a time when , I too, like my nephew was full of innovative thoughts. Then what made me into this person, who subconsciously picks up a negative feeling over its much simpler and familiar homonym? And what is it that makes my nephew so full of simple yet amazing ideas?

Kids play, jump, run, fall, get up, shake the dust of their clothes and play again. We adults, after we fall, indulge ourselves in self-pity. Why don’t we think it as an inevitable event, shake the dust off and go about our task again? Have you ever seen two kids fighting? Sometimes their fight escalates to such an extent that adults need to intervene. But for how much time do you think the fight lasts? Not for long. They make up and resume playing with each other. What about us adults? We can hold a grudge for years! Isn’t it despicable? We teach them all the good habits and don’t follow most of the things. We tell kids TV, Laptop, Tabs, Smartphones are addictive and that they should avoid the temptation and do their homework. And when they sit across us doing their homework, we indulge in all these addictive things.

We limit ourselves by building boundaries around our thoughts. We think we have knowledge, but that knowledge should serve as a bridge to connect with new ideas, not as a fence, to limit our imagination.

So, if I can go back in time and change something, I will change the conditioning of my mind. I will try to become more open to different possibilities, let my thoughts lead me to the unknown, instead of me leading them to the (boring) known places.

No, I’m not going to discuss the pros and cons, the effects it will have on socio-economical scene in the Europe etc. The internet is full with discussions, tweets, and articles about all these things. I just… Okay, first read the news, that appeared in my newsfeed on 27th June, 2016. (Check out the origional article here.)

Brexit: Racist abuse in UK reported since vote to leave EU

(CNN) :Racial abuse is on the rise in post-Brexit Britain, a Conservative British MP said as police confirmed they were investigating several racially motivated crimes.

Anti-immigrant leaflets saying “Leave the EU – no more Polish vermin” were put on cars near a school, local police said, the day after the country voted to leave the European Union.

On Sunday, the Polish Social and Cultural Association in Hammersmith, west London, was allegedly vandalized with a racist slogan.

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi

Conservative politician and lawyer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who quit the “Leave” campaign shortly before the vote, told Sky News that organizations working with race crime victims had seen a rise in reports of abuse since the Brexit vote.

“I’ve spent most of the weekend talking to organizations, individuals and activists who work in the area of race hate crime, who monitor hate crime and they have shown some really disturbing early results from people being stopped in the street and saying look, we voted Leave, it’s time for you to leave,” she said.

On Monday, the Muslim Council of Britain released a gallery of “100 hate incidents” it had taken from social media and called on the Home Secretary to step up security for migrants.

“We are witnessing the shocking extent of this with reports around the country of hate speech and minorities being targeted,” Muslim Council of Britain Secretary General Dr Shuja Shafi said.

“We need leadership now more than ever before. Our country is experiencing a political crisis which, I fear, threatens social peace.”

Well, after reading the above piece, do I need to say anything else?

But I will. because after reading the news, my mind is plagued with lot of questions. Why do people have to hold grudge about other people, whom they don’t even know personally; just because their ethnicity?

I feel this is ridiculous. Most of these immigrants are born and brought up in UK. They are a part of UK’s workforce, their economy, and they are as much valuable as other citizens of the country. Still when they are referred in any piece of news, any article, they are called immigrants! Why, I ask myself, are we humans fighting against each other, when we have more pressing issues on our hands like terrorism and global warming. We talk about finding water on Mars and colonizing moon, and on the other hand we mock each other based on our accent, nationality and ethnicity. Isn’t that stupid?

Give me a name of one single person who can vouch for his race. Nobody will come forward. There’s no such thing as a pure race, not anymore. The only thing we know for sure now is that we are the descendants of Homo sapiens. If at all, we should be proud of our culture and customs. But that doesn’t mean we should be disrespectful to others culture. Insulting someone on the basis of their facial features or their birthplace is downright cruelty.

So please, people! Can we have some empathy and stop such acts? Let’s make the world better by having some harmony.

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‘Summer’ is the hardest season to survive in the Indian subcontinent. The scorching heat, sweat trickling down your spine, those occasional heat waves almost make me think now that this season should never exist… well almost! Because Summer means much more than that!